quality data

On Tuesday President Bush signed a bill requiring the four federal agencies in charge of healthcare--HHS, the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Office of Personnel Management--to share data amongst agencies and with beneficiaries. At a recent discussion on the subject, President Bush stated, "The fact is, if you have excellent information about quality, about service and about price, people make good decisions," according to The Washington Post. The …

It seems that every week we hear about a state or insurer that's taking steps toward increasing transparency. This week's offering comes from Aetna, which announced that it will report the cost of 30 common procedures in the Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia area. The information will be available to consumers on Aetna's Web site and quality ratings will also be available for providers of 12 different specialties. Aetna's Web site is a step in the right direction but critics say …

Apparently, Americans don't like having to do homework any more than they did when they were children. A study of 1,000 adults, which was commissioned by Destiny Health and conducted by Opinion Research Corporation, has found that despite our concerns about healthcare costs, most people are reluctant to research cost and quality data even if it's readily available. Health officials have made a lot of noise about increasing transparency in the healthcare system, though two recent …

In more of its series on Medicare, The Washington Post takes a look at quality improvement organizations (QIOs). The paper looks at the role of groups like Indiana-based Health Care Excel, which collects quality data for the government and investigates complaints at some hospitals. The planners who set up the system may have meant well, but their effectiveness has been hampered by the trend toward "a new brand of regulation that favors cooperation over discipline." Critics …

The Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration project, the pay-for-performance pilot being sponsored by CMS, looks like it is a success so far with participating hospitals showing quality improvements almost across the board. Quality data collected over the last year shows that hospitals involved in the test have improved their collective performance score by 7.5 percent. Marked improvements were seen particularly in the quality of care delivered for heart failure patients and pneumonia …